Classics and French

Classics and French is a combination that spans an extraordinary range of intellectual time and cultural space, from the ancient worlds of Greece and Rome to the rich modern tradition of French literature and culture. Greek and Latin literature includes some of the most moving and thought-provoking writing produced in any civilisation, from the epics of Homer and Virgil and the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles to the philosophy of Plato and Cicero and the satire of Juvenal. French adds a living language with its own remarkable literary tradition, and the two sit together with a coherence that their shared history of intellectual exchange and mutual influence makes natural.

At the University of St Andrews, this four-year full-time MA programme develops your Latin and Greek language skills alongside your proficiency in French, building the capacity to engage with texts in their original languages as well as the literary and cultural analytical skills that are powerful tools for understanding complex texts and problems. A year abroad is built into the programme, giving you extended immersion in a Francophone environment that deepens your linguistic fluency and cultural understanding while adding a modern counterpoint to your study of the ancient world.

Graduates with training in classical languages and French are genuinely unusual in the graduate market, and their skills are valued in a range of fields where linguistic depth, cultural range and analytical rigour are prized. Teaching, academic research, translation, publishing, the heritage and museum sector, journalism, law and the civil service are all natural career directions. The combination of ancient and modern languages and literatures also provides an exceptional foundation for postgraduate study in classics, modern languages, comparative literature, history or medieval and renaissance studies.